11 held after village massacre in Bihar

Police arrested 11 people yesterday in connection with the killing of 34 lower-caste villagers in eastern India's crime-ridden Bihar state.

At least 16 villagers were injured, several critically, and officials in the state capital, Patna, said the death toll might rise.

Inspector-general of police Neelmani said the arrests followed raids on several hideouts of the banned Ranvir Sena, a private militia of upper-caste landlords, which has claimed responsibility for Friday night's massacre in Miapur village, in Aurangabad district.

About 100 masked gunmen dragged villagers out of bed late at night and began executing them before some of the armed locals banded together and began firing at the intruders in a gun battle that lasted nearly two hours.

It ended only when the residents ran out of ammunition, and 34 villagers, including 13 women and nine children, lay dead. All those killed belonged to the Yadav caste, whose members are traditionally milkmen and figure low in Hinduism's social hierarchy.

Senior police officials said the massacre, the third in two weeks, was in retaliation for the killing of 12 upper-caste landlords who were supporters of the Ranvir Sena.

The Ranvir Sena emerged in 1994 to fight Maoist groups in rural Bihar. It was banned a year later, but through political and police patronage continued to operate and has been responsible for 21 massacres in which nearly 350 people died.

Officials said nearly 2,500 people had died in caste-related violence in Bihar since the mid-1970s, while the unofficial death toll is at least three times higher.

"Regular bloodletting has become a ritual in rural Bihar, trapping the rich and poor in an unbreakable cycle of violence," said a police official. He said the state had neither the infrastructure nor the political will to combat either the caste system, illiteracy or abject poverty.